During Pimienta’s show, she asked people of color to move to the front of the room and white people to move to the back – a request that is often part of her sets – when a white volunteer, reportedly there to photograph the show, along with several other white people in the audience reacted to Pimienta’s invitation to relocate “brown girls to the front” of the room with overt racism.
The response on social media to this incident has been mixed. Some understood Pimienta’s view and her right as an artist to conduct her performance any way that advances her art and agenda, while others called it “reverse racism” and countered with “what ifs.”
The key issue, however, was not Pimienta’s request, but the response to it by some audience members, which the HPX festival described as “aggressive and racist” in a lengthy apology to the artist.
[…]
Billboard: Why do you ask people of color to move to the front of the room and how long has this been part of your show?
Lido Pimienta: I started asking men specifically to go to the back of the room because in my 15+ years of attending shows, both on stage and in the audience, men make it unsafe for me to be in such spaces.
From the audience’s point of view, [men] for the most part will not think twice before they put themselves right in front of you. I am a short woman, so I always have to show up very early to be able to enjoy the music, to see the acts… From the stage point of view, I noticed how most men who plant themselves at the front, they tend to overpower ME. Their presence usually at my own show is a threatening one and I have had men grab me, grab my hands, grab my waist, scream “TE AMO MAMACITA.” My show is all about high energy and high feminine power, so I can see for some men, my energy reads “sexual” and they feel like my show is FOR THEM, when in fact, my show if anything, is for WOMXN.
When I started asking womxn to the front, I noticed how white women were usually at the front and brown girls would be behind the white girls, a bit more shy, a bit more restrained. Even at HPX, I had to call out a few black girls who were “too shocked” and felt I was “putting them on the spot” by saying, “Girl come to the front! This is for you!” As an immigrant, as an Afro-Indigenous person, as an intersectional feminist, as a mother and all of the other signifiers that qualify me as “other,” I understand what it is like to not see yourself in the media, to not see yourself in institutions and to not see yourself represented or reflected at a music show, because the “artist of colour” (and I put that in quotation marks because even that term is extremely problematic), we don’t get to see each other at that level.
Lido Pimienta Speaks Out After Racism Controversy at Halifax Pop Explosion Festival
Lady Jace Of The Fae 